Distributed file systems, file sharing services, etc. have been provided. In one approach, a file system client, application, and/or agent running on a client system may receive file system calls made by applications running on the client system, and may be configured to make corresponding calls to a remote file system server, e.g., a metadata server. For example, to store or update a file the file system client may generate and send to the file system metadata server a write request. The write request may identify a plurality of chunks of data desired to be written to a file. The metadata server may be configured to provide a response indicating one or more locations, e.g., in a cloud-based object store, to which the data should be written by the client.
Some file system features, such as de-duplication, may be optimized by working with chunks of data that are relatively small compared to the object size of objects that cloud-based or other object stores may be optimized to store.